Moon House ruins

Stephen Fischer Photography

The primary Moon House ruin is unique for the outer wall that shields an outer court from a set of separate chambers inside.  This makes for some interesting lighting opportunities for your photography.  I found the mid day lighting to still work out OK for shooting the interior area.  There is also some original painting work on this interior court area along with inside some of the inner kivas. It is quite remarkable for its level of preservation and uniqueness from other sites I have seen.  There are also additional kivas adjacent to the main structure along with some separate ones on the canyon ledge within a few hundred yards of the primary one.  As a result, you can spend many hours exploring the ruins on this part of the canyon.

As one method to create some more interesting compositions of the ruins, I lugged an authentic Papago basket (circa first half of the 1900's) with me (that I personally purchased earlier) on this trip to use as a prop for some of the scenes.  I carried it in a specially padded tupperware container strapped on my backpack along with some paperwork to prove my ownership of it in case stopped by a ranger or BLM employee.  I figured it could help accentuate the mood of some of these locations for the purpose of producing some fine art exhibit quality results later.  An example of this is shown in the top center image. Don and John joked with me on this trip that this basket was starting to remind them of that gnome from those Travelocity ads.  Hopefully you don't see me lugging it out to the Racetrack or the Wave in the future :^)